Edwin spent a great deal of his time on his parochial duties. He did the rounds, regularly visiting people in their homes, congratulating them on their successes, offering condolences where necessary.
‘A few words of comfort or sympathy here and there don’t go amiss,’ his wife Elizabeth said. ‘That’s what people want from their vicar, a bit of fellow feeling.’
Increasingly he felt that was all they wanted. The numbers of his church-going public had dropped off dramatically of late. The choir was often bigger than the congregation and that wasn’t saying much. There were a few ardent followers, women, who kept the church tidy, arranged the flowers, organised baskets of fruit to distribute among the parishioners at the harvest festival. They were the ones who kept the whole operation ticking over. He didn’t know what he would do without them. But nobody wanted to be preached at anymore, at least not in their own homes. Preaching was reserved strictly for the Sunday service.
Births, marriages, and deaths. That was his main function. He had become quite the expert. He conducted marriages ceremonies, baptized newborns, and laid the dead to rest with aplomb. He disliked funerals though. They required more thought. What did you say to someone who had lost a close family member, friend, or neighbour? Of course you could offer your condolences. But that was not enough. People looked to their vicar for more than that. They wanted you to give some meaning to it all, to reassure them that they were going to a better place, in heaven. There was no need to mention hell these days.
‘Time is a great healer,’ was what Elizabeth always said on these occasions. She was better at condolences. He had heard it so many times that it was starting to sound hollow.
‘God has put us on this earth for a reason,’ he sometimes found himself saying. ‘It’s up to us to find out what that is.’
‘How are we supposed to do that?’ one bright spark had asked him in Sunday school. ‘Is it a guessing game.’ He had struggled to find an answer to that one, mumbling something about the need to read the Bible.
He blamed Miss Bishop, the new teacher who had recently come to the village and was helping him conduct the Sunday school. She was an English literature specialist who liked poetry and drama of which he whole-heartedly approved. It was good to have a soul mate. Elizabeth was more of a practical person and never concerned herself with literary matters. Miss Bishop and he had put on a nativity play, which had gone down very well. Her dramatic talents hadn’t stopped at that. She had assembled a troupe of actors and had been putting on dramatic performances for parents in the evening. He had observed reluctantly that more people were attending her plays than came to his church services.
If only it had stopped there. But she’d taken it into her head to introduce all sorts of new ideas into the curriculum. Now pupils were coming up with challenging questions like
‘If God is good, why does he let evil things happen?’ or ‘Why do the rich get away with murder?’ To which his stock answer was that it wasn’t God who was evil, but human beings, and we must all strive to be better.’
One day a small boy sidled up to him after Sunday school. ‘Why did God let the dinosaurs die?’ He asked. ‘They were God’s creatures too. Why didn’t he let them survive? Didn’t he love them?’
The question had stumped him for a while. Eventually he replied.
‘God loves all his creatures, whether they survive or not. No doubt you will meet your beloved dinosaurs again in the Afterlife.’
The boy went way looking mystified.
This was all getting difficult. He’d better have a word with Miss Bishop. She was putting ideas into the children’s heads that they weren’t ready for or equipped to deal with. If they started to question the existence of God at that age, who knew where it would all end? And if their parents didn’t back him up, the congregation would fall even further. He might have to share his duties with another parish and have double the workload to deal with. He’d better some up with some answers with regard to the Afterlife. He’d make it the subject of his next sermon.
But first he needed to tackle Miss Bishop. After all, it was supposed to be a church school. There should be some observance of religion. He caught her on the way out of church.
‘I was wondering if you’d like to pop round for tea one afternoon,’ he said.
Miss Bishop’s face registered surprise. ‘Tea with the vicar?’ she scoffed. ‘Isn’t Mrs. Goodwin away this weekend? I thought she’d gone to the W.I. conference?’
‘Well, yes she has, as a matter of fact,’ Edwin muttered. ‘But that shouldn’t affect matters.’
‘In that case, I’d rather wait until she returns,’ Miss Bishop said haughtily.
The cheek of it. The presumption. Miss Bishop had made it sound like he was inviting her for some sort of illicit liaison. The very idea of it. He would have to postpone the conversation until after the weekend. And in the meantime, he had a sermon to plan.
Whenever Elizabeth was away, he liked to sit in a comfy chair beside the front window rather than at his desk. Eizabeth was a great fan of birds and had erected a bird table outside, directly in front of the window. From there she followed their daily activities and was familiar with all the different species and their feeding habits.
‘The Great Tits are the greediest,’ she said. ‘They don’t give the other birds a chance. The long- tailed tits always come in flocks. The Robin is prepared to wait its turn. The Blackbird doesn’t even bother to come any more. The Wren which is the smallest slips in between the rest. My favourites are the Chaffinches and Goldfinches because they have such pretty colours.’
Instead of getting down to work, Edwin found himself gazing out of the window. He couldn’t look at the finches without associating them with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Adaptation of species to the environment all happened so randomly. How was he supposed to square it with God’s plan for the universe?
Elizabeth found him asleep in his chair when she returned that evening. The sermon was still unwritten.
